When playing games recently, mainly Civilisation 3, many errors appear such as: ‘civ3conquests.exe has caused an invalid page fault. Beginning stack dump…’. In an attempt to fix the problems, I decided to upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows XP. However, during the installation a message appeared saying ‘C: drive is corrupted. Installation cannot continue. Press F4 to quit setup’. Could this be the source of my problems? (more…)

Six months ago I bought The Sims Deluxe Edition. This worked until I installed The Sims Hot Date Expansion Pack. The game goes through the usual loading process but then returns to the desktop. (more…)

When playing certain games the computer will frequently cut to the desktop without any notice. No error messages appear and we are not accidentally pressing the Windows key. However, it doesn’t close the game - we simply need to click the game icon on the task bar to make it reappear. What’s happening? A second problem is whenever Windows starts there are a couple of folders that automatically open. How can this be prevented? (more…)

When attempting to open Neverwinter Nights, by double-clicking the NWN icon, nothing happens - no error messages and no conflict messages. However, upon shutting down Windows a message appears with a progress bar displaying ‘NWN is shutting down’ as if it has been running in the background. The computer is a Pentium 4 2.6GHz with 256 MB RAM and a 128 MB ATI Radeon video card. (more…)

After a hard drive crash the computer was upgraded from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. I reinstalled Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 under the Administrator account, but when my son tries to play the game as a regular user it will not start. I have given his user full rights over the ‘Activision’ folder and sub-folders on the hard drive, and for the CD drive. He can play the game fine using profile account so I assume it has something to do with the security settings in Windows XP. Do you have any ideas other than giving him administrator rights? (more…)